Spiffy:

Iffy:

May favor players with lots of money; could resort to nickle-and-dime tactics.

BattleForge is an original property from EA Phenomic, a game that combines real-time strategy with the insidiously addictive nature of collectible card gaming. The game is built around sucking the time and money right out of any players careless enough to get trapped into this ingenious scheme.

Instead of the traditional resource management that most strategy games employ, BattleForge is about capturing territory to accumulate power, which in turn is used to pay the casting costs for various cards. These cards can represent blocks of infantry units, larger, more powerful super-units, or game-changing spell effects. Every army is completely customizable, so it's your personal strategy (and the size of your card collection) that will determine the force that you'll control in the game. In any good collectible card game, a game can often be won before it even begins, with proper deck-building strategy. In BattleForge, the cards are just the tools, and you'll still need real-time strategy skills to use them to their fullest.

Making War Collectible

There are four armies in BattleForge, built around archetypes that will be quite familiar to anyone who's played a game in the fantasy milieu before. The red army is based around fire and violent elementals, its strength lying in dealing direct damage and "tanking." The blue frost army is more defensive, with healing spells and siege weapons. The purple army will be shadow-based, so we can presume that they'll deploy undead forces, while the green nature army will probably bring to bear a giant tree or two.

The creatures you'll use range from standard fantasy wizards and soldiers to enormous juggernauts and monolithic titans that bring brute strength to bear. These larger units serve as both siege weapons and as soldiers, capable of toppling the strongest walls or cutting a deadly swath through swarms of packed enemy troops.

The kinds of forces that these armies will utilize aren't limited to those included in the initial 200-card set. Booster expansions will be released regularly, bringing new cards into the fold based on consumer demand. These cards will be purchased through microtransactions, with your real-world currency converting to the BattleForge currency. You won't be able to cash out, but you can use that coinage to buy booster packs or to purchase cards from other players in a meaty economy system that is modeled after robust MMORPG economies.